Over many years and many discussions I found that Deltek Vision’s concept of job costing is still a stumbling stone for many accounting specialist, especially when it comes to explain this to their accountant at year end.

The main issue with this is probably because most consultants will tell these firms to offset the values in the job cost credit account with actual payroll cost and it will never tie out. Let me try to fix this later in this post.

Over the years I found that people always had a hard time getting started with Deltek Vision’s API. I do admit, it probably has a lot to do with the message structures the API is expecting.

To jump-start your development I just created an online Test Bench that allows you to connect to your service, run some reads and writes and returns you both a VB.net code sample and a SOAP UI request message that can be copied either into Visual Studio or SOAP UI to give you instant results.

Does your company track company vehicle cost? Did you ever wonder if you charge enough for their usage back to the client?

One way of doing this is using some of the advanced features in the Units Info Center. In the unit definition there is a field called Credit Account. If you put a valid financial account into this field, Vision will start posting offsetting credits for any unit that has cost assigned to it, similar to what the Job Cost Variance account does.

User initiated work flows are the back bone of Vision’s extensibility. You are able to react on every insert, update or delete for any info center record and create your own validations, field calculations or messages for the event. You can even call your own code functions, web services and stored procedures. But there’s on big limitation you have to remind yourself…

The longest and hardest fought over sessions in a Vision implementation are always project numbering and project structures.

While project numbering is usually defined by a legacy application or legacy filing system (and it’s less of an issue as most people think) I came across some misconceptions on Vision’s Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and how to use them.

Did your finance department ever approach you to create them that one specific report that’s missing? Did you ever wonder if you could write a report that would take advantage of Deltek Vision’s ® reporting capabilities and allow you to create selections, set up your own grouping, show and hide columns and create your own favourites? Or did you ever wanted to create invoices with a bit more bling than the plain standard ones?

Then the following chapters will help you doing just that. In the first article we will go through a step-by-step guide on how to create your own custom report.

This blog will show you how to write a custom SOAP web service that can be hooked up to one of Vision’s validation workflows (timesheets, expenses, transaction postings) and all the do’s and dont’s around it.